Thirty-five years after the Supreme Court's landmark Roe vs. Wade decision, a pill that has largely faded from the rancorous public debate over abortion has slowly and quietly begun to transform the experience of ending a pregnancy in the United States.

On the market since 2000, the French abortion pill RU-486 has become an increasingly common alternative, making abortion less clinical and more private. At a time when the overall number of abortions has been steadily declining, a new survey reported that RU-486-induced abortions have been rising by 22 percent a year and now account for 14 percent of the total - and more than 1 in 5 of early abortions performed by the ninth week of pregnancy.

The pill, often called "miffy" after its chemical name, mifepristone, and brand name, Mifeprex, also has helped slow the decline in abortion providers, as more physicians who previously did not perform the procedure discreetly start to prescribe the pill.

Some predicted RU-486 would revolutionize the abortion experience and debate by enabling women to get an abortion from any doctor, neutralizing one of opponents' most potent strategies - picketing abortion clinics.

"That didn't pan out," said Carole Joffe, a professor of sociology at UC Davis. "But the impact has been happening gradually as it slowly and steadily is becoming integrated into the medical system."

Judi Gilbert, 41, a nurse in Philadelphia, opted for mifepristone. She had a 3-year-old son and was about to start a new job. "It was something I could do at home and be with my husband," Gilbert said of taking the pill. "It was just a much more private affair."

Gilbert is one of more than 840,000 U.S. women who have used mifepristone since it was approved, according to Danco Laboratories, which sells it.

The drug ends a pregnancy by blocking the hormone progesterone. Women take the pill in the doctor's office and then go home, where they take another drug, misoprostol, to trigger contractions, essentially causing a miscarriage. Women then return to the doctor within about two weeks to make sure the process worked.

About 150,000 of the 1.2 million abortions in the United States in 2006 were done with medication, the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit reproductive health research organization, estimated. More than half of abortion providers now offer the option, a 70 percent increase from the first half of 2001, Guttmacher said. The increase is alarming to abortion opponents, who are expecting thousands to gather in Washington Tuesday to protest Roe vs. Wade on its 35th anniversary.

O'Bannon questioned the drug's safety, citing a handful of reports of women who have died from severe complications from bacterial infections. Supporters say that it remains unclear whether the complications were related to the drug, and that overall the method has been shown to be safe.

The increase in mifepristone use has been fueled in part by more doctors and clinics that previously did not perform abortions now offering the drug. Guttmacher identified at least 119 and said those practices have slowed the decline in abortion services. The number of providers fell 2 percent from 1994 to 2005 - a much slower decline than before the drug became available.